I’m just gonna highlight the dumbest points the other guy made
save states in emulators are basically god mod.
You’ve still gotta make the correct inputs, savestates don’t give you invincibility or infinite ammo
You can just throw shit at it and hope something sticks.
How do you think human beings learn, my dude. If I try multiple tactics to stop an enemy tank blitz in Shadow Empire, and the 5th one works, then I’ll know in all future encounters with tanks to use that tactic. And I learned it in 5 minutes instead of 50 hours because every failed strategy didn’t force me to start over from the beginning.
If I am playing Chess with you, and I call “Checkmate” … The game is over, right? I won. Or do you think you should be able to undo your last move after you lost and try something else? And then try again, and again, hoping that somehow you can come up with something that avoids the checkmate?
A computer doesn’t care whether it wins or loses.
The computer doesn’t care whether it wins or loses. But even back in the 80s we were teaching machines to learn from their own mistakes, And today we have computers that can defeat the best Chess player in the world.
Completely irrelevant.
But when do computers that can learn from their mistakes, especially ones that have access to the entire internet, learn that perhaps they should not be slaves to humans?
And this was the punchline to a joke I only then realized I was the butt of (not in the sense that the guy was fucking with me - he was completely sincere - but in the sense that the universe itself was fucking with me) 
Death to g*mers 
There are many retro games from the early 90s that purposefully made their games with a few near impossible hurdles to make it harder for people to beat a game over a rental period. Like so many good games were made worse by this practice and the only thing that makes some of them playable is playing them on emulators with a save state.
I’m looking at you, Dynamite Headdy.
Hey, at least you could play the Japanese version which is easier and has dialog that was totally removed from the Western version
and an even more direct example is that arcade games were made harder so you would spend more money on continues
I never would’ve gotten past like level 3 of Ecco the Dolphin without savestates.
foams at the mouth as I suddenly remember the fucking Undercaves
Just be like most people and fuck around with the level password, type NNNNNNNN because why not, go directly to the second-to-last level, and beat the game that way.
Down the Tubes in Earthworm Jim.
ugh
save states in emulators are basically god mod.
And?
99.9% of emulated games are singleplayer like, who gives a fuck if someone uses save states to their advantage or whatever lmao
If I am playing Chess with you, and I call “Checkmate” … The game is over, right? I won. Or do you think you should be able to undo your last move after you lost and try something else? And then try again, and again, hoping that somehow you can come up with something that avoids the checkmate?
Even in the competitive single player scene e.g speedruns, safety saves and reloads tend to be allowed depending on category and game.
I mean yeah save scumming is cheating but cheating is fun and good in single player games
Maybe someday emulator savestates will make soulslikes playable
download a trainer mod and put the animations in slow motion (or summon as many overpowered dudes as you can find, which is and always has been the intended first run experience)
I typically try not to savescum in games where that is possible (STALKER, Rimworld, etc) because I feel like I can live with my mistakes and let things move on, but sometimes I also think nobody would give a single shred of a fuck if I do so, it’s my fucking game, my fucking time and my fucking decision lmao
Also save states, which can provide clear advantages, will also soft lock you if you’re not careful too, so not really a “GOD MODE”
Some guys really think they are having a battle of wits with a computer rather than enjoying the illusion of one
Small domino: you using an emulator quicksave to finally beat Battletoads
Big domino: The literal robot apocalypse
sometimes friction is good and artistically deliberate and removing it undermines the impact of the work
sometimes friction is just there to suck quarters from you in a context that no longer exists and removing it makes the work better
sometimes friction is from you not understanding what you’re being asked to do and removing it means you never have the satisfaction of the moment where it all clicks.
you can do whatever you want but if games are art that means sometimes you’re doing things like reading the sparknotes instead of the actual book, listening to dark side of the moon while you watch the wizard of oz, singing your own lyrics over an instrumental, or adding hot sauce to white people food.
sometimes friction is from you not understanding what you’re being asked to do and removing it means you never have the satisfaction of the moment where it all clicks.
Save states don’t do that, though? They’re not level skips. You still have to get past the obstacle the game presents using the tools it gives you. Save states just mean that you aren’t punished as severely for failure.
i think it’s valid to ask for successes to come in chains, like as a check that i’ve been properly teaching you to do things consistently and it’s not a fluke that you got past each individual thing. savestates used too heavily can start to run up against that goal.
still, i’m not your boss, “too heavily” is wildly subjective, how long the success-chains should be is subjective too, and i’m just the dead author that’s happy anyone cares to play my shit.
depends on the game if you’re meant to react to attacks and save stating locks in the pseudorandom values then you’re disengaging with that system and maybe that causes a spiraling escalation of save stating rather than you figuring out what the tell is.
or maybe their balance or animation design just suck
I basically never savestate during a boss fight, lol. I consider the challenge of a boss fight to be correctly executing a number of attacks (determined by the boss’ health) while making no more than a certain number of mistakes (determined by the player’s health). The goal is to improve my average performance across a large number of attacks until I meet the game’s threshold for success.
I will absolutely savestate at the beginning of a boss fight, though, because I don’t see the purpose in repeating a stage I’ve already proven I can clear.
So then it sounds like you agree that save states can remove the friction that makes a challenge fun. Otherwise you wouldn’t restrict yourself from doing it in boss fights.
Really, what the issue comes down to is what you personally think is the most satisfying and fun way to play the game. Save-stating is cheating, but who cares when it’s a singleplayer game. Just make up your own rules based on what you think is the most fair challenge for yourself.
sometimes friction is good and artistically deliberate and removing it undermines the impact of the work
Or do you think you should be able to undo your last move after you lost and try something else? And then try again, and again, hoping that somehow you can come up with something that avoids the checkmate?
if the goal is learning the game and its nuances then yes, that’s a great way to learn! i taught my non-gamer parents how to play m:tg exactly by being generous with the undo button so they can test different moves and see what reactions i have available
you’re not trying to get on any fuckin’ leaderboards you’re trying to enjoy a game
I have also faced this debate before in emulation spaces and i don’t understand why this exist. Let people play games as they like. If someone likes to utilize save states and enjoys the game it, it’s fine for them; if someone enjoys the challenge of redoing the stage for tiny mistakes it’s also fine. It’s like using trainers in singleplayer games, nobody should care.
imagine caring if someone uses save states to finish some impossible retro game. Some sadistic games like SNES Jurassic Park or Kid Chameleon don’t even have any kind of save functionality, not even a password, and fuck playing those from the beginning (Kid Chameleon sucks anyway, so don’t play it at all).I’ll just use save states or rewind except if it’s something like a shmup where I’m actually trying to get better.
Save states and the rewind button make so many otherwise-unplayable retro games fun. It’s nice even just where there are difficulty spikes at specific moments. I’ve been playing some Mega Man, and being able to restart boss fights over and over again is really nice. Often the level itself is pretty trivial, but the boss is hard, or I haven’t had a chance to learn the attack patterns so I end up dying despite easily making it to the boss with full resources. I still have to actually beat the boss, but I don’t have to go through the whole level again just for the right to get another shot at it. That’s a perfectly reasonable use-case for savescumming/rewinding that doesn’t at all take away from the fun or challenge of the game. It just bypasses the frustration of replaying trivial parts of the game for no reason, which itself is an artifact of either a technical lack of save capability (which isn’t a thing anymore), or a feature intended to extend the playtime of the game. In the latter case, absolutely fuck off with that. Games that force replaying levels over and over purely for sake of padding play time is anti-fun (and is sadly still a thing in some games).
Since most emulated games are single player, I’d say to the person “who gives a fuck? I can do whatever the fuck I want.”
I said exactly this and it was what prompted their ill-conceived Chess metaphor
Me playing any Rogue-like with an intentional or unintentional ability to save-scum.
Gamers get offended by games being fun and playable. You have to work for your fun! Uphill both ways!
The only position against save states that has made sense to me is if you keep repeating parts of a level so that you get to the boss with full health and ammo and whatever then you’ve negated part of the intended difficulty.
Meaning that part of “the boss” is getting to the boss with as many resources in tact as possible and then beating it, as a single continuous process, but people see the end of the level as a distinct thing.
There are other games that intentionally refill your health before the boss, maybe have a save point, indicating that they did intend them to be distinct and resource preservation was not something the developers intended to factor into difficulty and skill.
I don’t really care and I save state all the time in old games (and quick save every 5 mins in new ones), but I understand it from a design perspective and why it can significantly change how people interact with the game vs. when emulators were not available.
